Trustees at odds over what was known about superintendent pick.

Dr. Manuel L. Isquierdo, lone finalist for SAISD superintendent and current superintendent of the Sunnyside UnifiedSchool District in Tucson, Arizona speaks with members of the media on Thursday April 11, 2013.

Photo By Helen L. Montoya/San Antonio Express-News

Dr. Manuel L. Isquierdo, lone finalist for SAISD superintendent and current superintendent of the Sunnyside UnifiedSchool District in Tucson, Arizona speaks with members of the media on Thursday April 11, 2013.

Photo By Helen L. Montoya/San Antonio Express-News

Dr. Manuel L. Isquierdo, lone finalist for SAISD superintendent and current superintendent of the Sunnyside UnifiedSchool District in Tucson, Arizona speaks with members of the media on Thursday April 11, 2013.

Photo By Helen L. Montoya/San Antonio Express-News

Dr. Manuel L. Isquierdo, lone finalist for SAISD superintendent and current superintendent of the Sunnyside UnifiedSchool District in Tucson, Arizona speaks with members of the media on Thursday April 11, 2013.

San Antonio Independent School District trustees will meet behind closed doors Monday to talk about what happened to their superintendent finalist last week.

It's likely to be a tense conversation.

They know that four days of pointed media attention caused Manuel Isquierdo to withdraw his candidacy. But board members are sharply divided over how much they knew about his financial and legal problems before they voted him their best hope to lead the district.

And they disagree completely over whether he could have been a viable candidate if he'd had the chance to define himself to the public before news reports did it first.

For a board that has worked hard in the past year to communicate better and appear more unified, these differences could signal the beginning of a return to old divisions.

“My goal in this last round was to get a unified front in the naming of a finalist,” school board President Ed Garza said Saturday. “Perhaps the candidate that has a unified base is not always the best candidate.”

The board was unanimous Monday night when it named Isquierdo. By the time he withdrew Friday, three of its members were openly skeptical he could be a role model for students when he owed $150,000 in federal taxes, had reimbursed his Tucson-area school district $12,545 in disallowed credit card charges and couldn't explain why a grand jury in Arizona wanted information about his marketing of a school laptop program.

Isquierdo met with reporters here Thursday and offered explanations. He knew nothing of the grand jury investigation, which didn't lead to any charge against him. He didn't receive the court summons over unpaid traffic tickets that led to suspension of his driver's license. He owes taxes because he got caught in California's housing bubble and lost $400,000 on a house he had to sell. He had learned from his mistakes, he said.

He withdrew his candidacy the next day, as reporters were confirming a blog post that he'd lost his $1.1 million house in Arizona to foreclosure.

The laptop incentive system was Isquierdo's signature accomplishment at Sunnyside Unified School District in Tucson, credited along with his motivational skills for improving graduation rates

Chairman Garza and trustees Debra Guerrero and Patti Radle said Saturday they were disappointed the public didn't get a chance to hear him talk about it and consider the vision and excitement he could have brought to SAISD schools, students and parents.

“There was a tremendous amount of chemistry with this gentleman and it was based on the fact that he had accomplished something that was nationally recognized,” Guerrero said.

Trustees James Howard, Adela Segovia and Olga Hernandez, however, by midweek had distanced themselves from the candidate and the search firm that recruited him, calling both flawed after reports of Isquierdo's problems surfaced.

“It's an embarrassment to SAISD,” Segovia said Friday of the job done by PROACT, the board's Illinois-based search firm. She wants the board to dump the company.

How good a search?

PROACT consultants could not be reached for comment on the search process but documents obtained this week by the San Antonio Express-News show Isquierdo was considered a “moderate fit” for the district based on a pre-employment personality assessment.

Verification of his doctorate in education from the National Louis University in Chicago was “pending” at the time the documents were provided to the board.

Garza, Radle and Guerrero said they don't blame PROACT. Garza said the board was unaware of the grand jury probe and the foreclosure, but had discussed Isquierdo's tax debt and the other issues and agreed his leadership promise outweighed them.

“You can be the Monday morning quarterback and try to retract what you do,” Guerrero said. “At the end of the day, we all agreed and we put him out there.”

The news media focus on Isquierdo's personal troubles hijacked the process, they said.

“It's kind of like the negative got out in front of everything and I think that the community never got to see what seven board members saw in this person,” Radle said.

Garza said the board likely will review PROACT's contract Monday and could hit the pause button on the search process as trustees regroup. Interim Superintendent Sylvester Perez, who has served for a year, is to continue in his role.

Before introducing a candidate to the public, somebody needs to get all the background information, and it's sometimes as simple as “asking the candidate, 'Is there anything that's going to embarrass you?'” noted Julian Trevino, a former SAISD board member who now directs the Center for Education Leadership, Policy and Professional Development at UTSA and who consults on superintendent searches.

“I don't know what contract they have or what kinds of specifications they have with the search firm,” he said. “But I know that you have to vet (candidates), otherwise the media will, there's no question.”

When PROACT was hired in June, trustees Segovia, Howard and Hernandez dissented.

“When you have a 4-3 vote on a search firm, that, to me, was not a proper beginning on this process,” Perez, the interim superintendent, observed Friday.

Who is Isquierdo?

If you ask Eva Carrillo Dong, a 13-year Sunnyside trustee, she'll tell you the SAISD board should have stuck with Isquierdo, 62.

He was hired in 2007 after Sunnyside's former superintendent, Raúl Bejarano had started to turn things around, Carrillo Dong said.

Predominantly minority and low-income, the 18,000-student district's two high schools were known as “dropout factories” because less than 60 percent of their freshmen stayed to see their senior year.

“When Dr. Isquierdo came, we told him, 'You need to get us to turn around,” she said.

She said Isquierdo made technology paramount in that effort. His staff put a laptop in the hands of every incoming freshman on the condition that they keep their grades and attendance up and take part in extracurricular activities.

To pay for the program, Isquierdo solicited donations from local business and community leaders and managed to raise $1.4 million at the height of the recession, Carrillo Dong said.

It landed Isquierdo in hot water when a school audit found the credit card charges he had to pay back. Isquierdo said Thursday they were used to buy gifts for sponsors of the program.

Carrillo Dong said a few of the charges were for personal things he couldn't expense — a hotel movie purchase and upgrading to a larger rental car when he took his family to a conference in McAllen.

“That was a ding on him,” Carrillo Dong said. “But these are not things that would stop me from making him a superintendent.”

Most of the other charges, she said, paid for lunch and dinner meetings with people Isquierdo was hoping would sponsor his laptop program, called “Project Graduation: The Digital Advantage.” Carrillo Dong said the board spoke to the district attorney about it.

In 2011 the board struck a deal with a Miami firm to market Project Graduation to other districts and gave Isquierdo $75,000 per year to cover his expenses as a salesman and consultant for that effort. It brought his annual compensation to $305,000.

“Our lawyer told us that Dr. Isquierdo was doing things that our state was not ready for and our state had not put into place laws for the innovative things that Dr. Isquierdo was doing,” she said.

Today, it's unclear whether the district has realized a profit on the arrangement. Few districts appear to have bought Digital Advantage, which Sunnyside bills as a nationally acclaimed program.

Neither the school district, Isquierdo or National Academic Educational Partners, the Miami company, returned calls for comment about Digital Advantage. The program is mentioned nowhere on the NAEP website.

One district that did partner with Sunnyside is Kokomo-Center Schools in Indiana, which paid the Arizona district about $40,000 for two years of staff development and support services.

Kokomo-Center Assistant Superintendent Pennye Siefert said Sunnyside helped her district implement the new technology effectively. She had nothing but praise for Isquierdo.

“Oh my goodness, I would hire him in a second,” she said. “He's a mover and a shaker but very much into the success of kids.”

But Shelley Potter, the president of the San Antonio Alliance for Teachers and Support Personnel, said she heard recurring complaints about Isquierdo from educators she spoke with in Arizona — that he didn't think he had to follow rules, took singular credit for group efforts and expected others to make salary sacrifices he wouldn't make.

Potter said that she also was told Isquierdo has a good vision and PR skills for the school district, that his laptop incentive program has made a big difference for students.

Next steps

Garza said he had no illusions about the public perception of the board in the wake of Isquierdo's withdrawal.

“I'm not kidding myself. People who haven't met (Isquierdo) are going to say, 'Are you crazy?'” Garza said. “Judgment is always easy when it's someone that you don't know.”

Asked if he was concerned about the board's old divisions reopening, Garza said he was optimistic.

“This was a missed opportunity for the school board to speak together as a unified group but I don't think that it's hard to get back to that point,” he said.

Guerrero also batted away the notion that the search had damaged public trust.

“We are going to find that person, I have no doubt that we will,” Guerrero said. “That's what the public is going to look at — is how we handle things now.”

mcesar@express-news.net

Staff Writers Lindsay Kastner and John Tedesco contributed to this report.